ASRock X58 Extreme3 Motherboard Performance Review

Overclocking the ASRock X58 Extreme3

Overclocking the ASRock X58 Extreme3 was made easy with the ASRock OC Tuner utility. A few simple clicks here and there and I was able to hit nearly 4.1GHz on my I7 920. Once I hit 3.8GHz the temperatures started approaching 90 degrees Celsius under load while using the ThermalTake SpinQ VT. In order to remove heat as an issue I decided to throw the ASRock X58 Extreme3 and the Intel I7 920 under some water cooling to improve the temperatures.

Once the water cooling was in place I raised the voltage on CPU VCore to a final voltage of 1.45V using the ASRock OC Tuner. The Bclk was bumped to 215 and the multiplier reduced to 19 for a final overclock of 4091MHz!

Now what would an overclock be without a benchmark or two to go along with it.

The first benchmark that I ran was Super Pi. As a result of the ~1.4GHz overclock the time needed to complete the calculations of 1 million decimal places of Pi dropped by ~34%. At stock speeds the I7 920 took 15.28 seconds to complete the calculations. Overclocked to ~4.1GHz it took only 10.027 seconds to complete. That is a massive drop. Now I ask the question, what would this page be without an overclocked 3dMark Vantage run?

It would be a page that is lacking. So there ya have it! An overall score increase of 2291 3dMarks isn’t too shabby. The impressive score is the CPU score. It increased by nearly 7600 points! That is a 45% increase in performance!